


The Road to Hell

by Artemis (Citrine)



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV)
Genre: Angst, Holmes POV, M/M, Slash, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-09
Updated: 2012-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-18 07:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Artemis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but sometimes things just don't work out as we would wish them to do:</p>
<p>Watson did not have time to close the bathroom door. I can hear him vomiting up the excellent dinner we were served, not that he did much more than toy with his food. My Watson, who is not my Watson, and who always has the healthiest of appetites.  It was the company that quite stole it away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road to Hell

**Author's Note:**

> An old story that I never got around to posting. I hope that you enjoy it.

Watson did not have time to close the bathroom door. I can hear him vomiting up the excellent dinner we were served, not that he did much more than toy with his food. My Watson, who is not my Watson, and who always has the healthiest of appetites.  It was the company that quite stole it away.

I do not even attempt to go to him. Instead I sink down on the stone window seat and press my forehead to the cold glass.

I wish that I were dead.

I hear the flush of the lavatory, the running of the tap and then he comes back into the bedroom the Baron has given us. I know that Watson will not look at me, but I watch him walk over to the decanter and pour himself a brandy to wash away the sourness of the vomit. The sourness of my kiss.

If only I could say that our deception compelled me to kiss him, but it is not so. It was my own moment of madness which shattered his regard for me. I have no one to blame but myself.

Watson has seen the worse of everything in this house of glass, absinthe and depravity. Old men pawing young boys, whippings and torture with the victims begging their tormentors for more.  He saw an act which carries a ten year prison sentence carried out in public between groups of three and four men. He saw their gold painted bodies, heard their false falsetto voices and it disgusted him.  Offers were made in the crudest of terms to both of us and it was only our claim of exclusivity that fended off the worse of them. The Baron, presiding over this debauchery, mocked us for it, but I saw something flicker in his eyes that might have been envy. How misplaced that was.

To my eternal shame I have to confess that the licentiousness of that evening both attracted and repelled me. Watson was simply revolted.  It was to his eternal credit that he maintained the deception  despite his disgust. I was the one who behaved disgracefully. My only defence is that my road to hell was truly paved with good intentions. 

I wanted to show him that love between men could be a tender passion, one that was far nobler than this orgy of decadence and corruption.  When I drew him into my arms he assumed that it was all part of the sham until I betrayed myself with a kiss. Watson did not flee like a virgin heroine in a yellow-back novel, but I saw the anger and the disgust in his eyes. 

I made our excuses soon afterwards and I was amazed that my voice did not shake when I bade the Baron good-night. The taunts and applause which followed us up the stairs made it plain that none of his drunken guests believed that we were going to sleep. Watson’s face was deadly pale and set in hard lines. He gripped the iron  stair rail and never even glanced in my direction. 

Watson sinks down into an overstuffed armchair.

There is a bed, a huge gaudy four-poster adorned with fake gemstones and naked cherubs.  He has slept beside me, completely untouched, for the past two nights. I know that he will not share it with me tonight.  Nevertheless, I settle, fully clothed, on the very edge of the bed with my face to the shadows. I wrap my arms around myself and shiver in the warm August air.  Neither of us will sleep tonight.

 “Go,” I say. It is the first word I have spoken to him since I damned myself forever.

“How?” he demands bitterly.

“We can manufacture an argument, a lover’s quarrel that has ended with you storming off in a rage.” Given my present demeanour it should not be difficult to convince the Baron that my heart is broken. 

“What about that poor woman? Married to that creature!”

The Baron is loathsome, that I do not deny, but the way Watson spits out the word ‘creature’ wounds me for I know that his repugnance encompasses us all.  I almost say that I do not care about our client, but then I think of her, married in innocence, robbed of her inheritance and incarcerated in an insane asylum when she threatened to speak of her husband’s perversions.

“The investigation is almost complete. It will not matter to her whether you go tonight or stay until the morning,” I say. “Either way she will soon be free and vindicated.  Tomorrow I shall tie up the last few loose ends and call Lestrade in to make the arrest.”

“Will you give evidence against the Baron?”

He does not trust me now. Birds of a feather flock together and Watson fears that I will not betray my own kind. The knife twists in the wound, but it is entirely self-inflicted.

“I would not have taken the case if I did not intend to do so.”

There is nothing more to be said and the night crawls towards the dawn in acrimonious silence.

The arrests are nor pleasant. There are many scuffles, much shouting and one man has to be dragged screaming out to the police van.  The Baron spits in my face and calls me a hypocrite. He saw how I looked at my Watson in those unguarded moments and he is not deceived.  Lestrade witnesses this and I know he is not deceived either, but he says nothing.  A man cannot be convicted for a look or even for a single kiss, at least not in a court of law.

I am already judged and condemned by a higher authority, one that I hold in far more esteem. The needle rocks me in its savage embrace. Watson does not rebuke me for it. Perhaps he recognises at last that I am beyond redemption.

Watson is not a cruel man.  It is not by choice that he turns his face from me. His own nature compels him to do so and if he finds me as abhorrent, as most natural men would, he does not vent his disgust in vicious words.  All he has said is that I should have told him long ago. I know that he is right. That my years of silence were a deception in themselves, but when ought I to have spoken out? At the beginning when we were young, newly met and sharing rooms for economy’s sake I would not have trusted him with so momentous a truth. Later, when we grew closer and I knew with absolute certainty that he would not betray me I hesitated lest he take my declaration of fact for a declaration of intent.  Nor would he have been wrong if he had done so.

He is to marry again, to leave Baker Street and this time I know that he will never return.  I am not invited to his wedding.  Not that I would go if I were, I have no wish to be the spectre at the feast.  He tells me afterwards that he thought it better that I did not attend when the ceremony could only cause me pain.  

We do not speak of it again. After his marriage we do not entirely sever our society.  Watson still calls on me occasionally and we even work together on one or two of my cases that require his medical expertise, but our long friendship is irrevocably damaged. 

It is 1902, a new era, a new century, but it holds no more allure for me than these empty rooms do. I retire, two years short of my fiftieth birthday and at the height of my fame, I slip away to lick my wounds among the bees on the Sussex coast.

Watson and I communicate rarely, a letter here a postcard there, rarer yet a visit to my hermitage.   When Watson does come down to the coast he does not speak overmuch about his London practise or about his new wife, whom I have never laid eyes upon.  Sometimes we do not speak at all and the silence is almost as companionable as it was before my fall from grace.   At the evening’s end he bids me good-night and even touches my shoulder lightly in passing.  I hear his tread on the old oak boards above my sitting room and the click of his bedroom door closing.  He does me the curtsey of leaving it unlocked. It seems that trust is not entirely dead.

He never stays for more than a weekend.  We walk down to the station together, speaking only of the commonplace and the impersonal.  Watson does not invite me to his London home nor does he ever promise to return to Sussex.  He does at least shake my hand in farewell as he stands at the carriage window. 

I stand upon the platform’s edge until his train is no more than a blur of iron and smoke on the horizon. 

I am alone.

 


End file.
